Welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on what's moving markets and policy.
The Financial Times is reporting that big tech is keeping roughly three hundred billion dollars in AI exposure off their balance sheets through guarantee structures, effectively using their credit strength to secure cheaper financing for the AI build-out without the debt showing up in their books. It's a Wall Street engineering play that keeps leverage ratios clean while the capital still flows — and it raises real questions about how investors should be pricing that hidden risk.
Staying with AI, President Trump has announced the formation of what he's calling an AI Force, alongside plans to appoint a so-called tsar to monitor for what he described as bad behavior. He's continued to resist formal regulation, but the announcement signals the administration is feeling pressure as alarm grows over the pace of the technology's advance. The framing is characteristically loose, but the institutional intent is real.
Crossing to the UK, the Office for National Statistics has revised upward its productivity figures for the decade following the two thousand eight financial crisis, showing output per hour grew at one point three percent annually between two thousand nine and two thousand nineteen — nearly double the prior estimate. That materially changes the narrative around Britain as a productivity laggard and has implications for how economists and policymakers reassess the post-crisis austerity debate.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
